A reporter who was escorted out of a White House event by Secret Service agents on Wednesday afternoon after he approached President Obama to seek an autograph has been identified, officials and witnesses said.

At the end of an East Room signing ceremony for legislation funding the State Children's Health Insurance Program, a member of the media jumped the rope penning off reporters from invited guests in an apparent attempt to get Obama's autograph, according to a White House aide.

An official familiar with the incident identified the journalist involved as Robert Feuereisen of Jewish World Review, a New York-based Web site which features primarily conservative Jewish writers. A message left at a phone listed in that name in Pikesville, Md. was not immediately returned.

The editor of the Web site, Binyamin Jolkovsky, confirmed to Politico that Feuereisen gathers information for the site and that he was the journalist who asked for Obama’s autograph Wednesday.

Feuereisen's 12-year-old son had bought an inaugural magazine of some sort for $8, and "his kid just drove him crazy," said Jolkovsky. The editor said Feuereisen has been working in the White House for more than 10 years, and did not lose his credential in the incident, but received a warning not to do it again. "He's harmless, to put it mildly," the editor said

Witnesses said Secret Service agents swooped in and stopped him after he approached Obama.

The Obama aide said the man was held by Secret Service—but he was seen in the White House press briefing room later Wednesday under escort of a White House press aide, apparently to retrieve personal belongings and make his way out of the complex.

"We did have contact with him after he obtained the president's autograph," a spokesman for the Secret Service, Ed Donovan, said. "He had a hard pass so we turned the matter over to the White House press office." Donovan referred questions about the journalist's identity to the White House, which had no additional comment Thursday.

Other reporters at Wednesday’s event said they saw the Secret Service examining the journalist's drivers' license. The reporter was also said to be carrying a black, hard-sided briefcase.